Resources for product teams from industry experts.
Objectives and Key Results are first and foremost an empowerment technique. The main idea is to give product teams real problems to solve, and then to give the teams the space to solve them. This goes right to the core of enabling ordinary people to create extraordinary products.
— EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan
The manager role is the “catalyst” role. As with all catalysts, the manager’s function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically, the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee’s talents and the company’s goals and between the employee’s talents and the customers’ needs.
When hundreds of managers play this role well, the company becomes strong, one employee at a time. No doubt, in today’s slimmed-down business world, most of these managers also shoulder other responsibilities. They are expected to be subject-matter experts, individual superstars and sometimes leaders in their own right. These are important roles, which great managers execute with varying styles and degrees of success. But when it comes to the manager aspect of their responsibilities, great managers all excel at this catalyst role.
— First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Gallup Press
Even with its imperfections, our evidence-based approach to learning about people, guiding them, and sorting them is much fairer and more effective than the arbitrary and subjective management systems that most organizations still rely on. I believe that the forces of evolution will push most organizations toward systems that combine human and computer intelligence to program principles into algorithms that substantially improve decision-making.
— Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Algorithms are principles in action on a continuous basis. I believe that systemized, evidence-based decision making will radically improve the quality of management. Human managers process information spontaneously using poorly thought-out criteria and are unproductively affected by their emotional biases. These all lead to suboptimal decisions. Imagine what it would be like to have a machine that processes high-quality data using high-quality decision-making principles and criteria. Like the GPS in your car, it would be invaluable, whether you follow all of its suggestions or not. I believe that such tools will be essential in the future.
— Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Two inner forces can drive a person to use all of his capabilities. He can be competence-driven or achievement-driven. The former concerns itself with job or task mastery. A virtuoso violinist who continues to practice day after day is obviously moved by something other than a need for esteem and recognition. He works to sharpen his own skill, trying to do a little bit better this time than the time before, just as a teenager on a skateboard practices the same trick over and over again. The same teenager may not sit still for ten minutes to do homework, but on a skateboard he is relentless, driven by the self-actualization need, a need to get better that has no limit. The achievement-driven path to self-actualization is not quite like this. Some people—not the majority—are moved by an abstract need to achieve in all that they do.
— High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
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